Transcript

Episode 5: Digging up a ghost town

Emily Charash (00:02) 
Hello and welcome to my summer in Alaska. My name is Emily Charash, and on this episode, you're going to shadow me throughout my archeology course. This class was amazing and crazy and the most different thing I've ever done, probably in my life. Class met Monday to Friday, nine to four, so definitely became close with the people in my class. There's like an art form to archeology. It's not just digging holes and finding whatever. There's this historical element and there's a nature element, and there's a discovery element to it. Right. Like, we're looking to find things that can tell us more about the past. My class definitely a passionate and interested group of people. Right? Everyone loves archaeology. Everyone is there to do archeology. As someone that is not an archeologist and more of an observer, it was pretty awesome seeing people interact with what they love for the first time on a professional level. So this is a lot of people's first field school and field school is like the precursor to being a professional in the field. Let's get some background from the professor on this course. 

Justin Cramb (01:08) 
My name is Dr. Justin Cramb. I'm an archaeologist with a specialty in Zoo archeology. I particularly work in sites in East Polynesia and on historic research here in Alaska. You are enrolled in my anthropology 490 course, which is the archaeological field school. So the field school has a combination of in class lecture and lab work, as well as actual field work out at the Chena Town Site archeological site, which is just outside of Fairbanks. So we spend a lot of our time excavating a real archeological site looking for evidence of past human activity, in particular gold rush era activity here in the Fairbanks area. 

Emily Charash (01:56) 
Can you give a breakdown of exactly what archaeology is and why people do it? 

Justin Cramb (02:00) 
Yeah. So archeology is the study of the human past through material culture, all of the things that are left behind by people, that can be artifacts like stone projectile points or arrowheads. It can also be things like people's former fire pits or their house foundations or anything, any traces that we leave behind on the environment being directly or indirectly, what we're trying to do as archaeologists kind of across the board is understand different patterns of human behavior, what people did in different places at different times, and kind of what that can teach us about our history as well as the way we go about our lives today. 

Emily Charash (02:47) 
Why did you become interested in this? What was the draw factor for you? 

Justin Cramb (02:52) 
So I kind of came to archeology a bit late in life. I came to College a bit late in life, honestly. Didn't really know what I wanted to do, didn't really know what career paths were viable. And then one day, after working for quite a long time doing manual labor and things of that nature, I just decided I'm going to do what interests me and we'll see where that takes me. So I enrolled at Central Michigan University as an undergraduate in their anthropology program, and within my first year was wrapped up in archeological research and kind of trying to identify the specific points of interest that I had in the human past and wound up traveling around the world doing different archaeological projects, and I think very quickly knew that it was going to be my career. 

Emily Charash (03:48) 
Do you have any memories of either past excavations or things that you have worked on where you're like, oh, this is a really cool result that I found, and I'm going to hold on to this. 

Justin Cramb (03:59) 
Yeah. So I think there are a lot of things that kind of impact you as an archaeologist and as an archeology student. You're working on diverse sites around the world, really, and everyone's going to have its own kind of influence on you, and you're going to make connections to that site. I've worked on historic sites in Michigan where you are really closely connected to the community. And you can see how just the simplest thing that you pull out of the ground, a child's marble or a toothbrush or something like that can evoke just this unbelievable emotion in people who are connected to this. This might be something that was their grandfathers or their great grandfathers or however far down the line. So those emotional connections with descendant populations really stand out for me. It's taking those small fines like you're mentioning those individual artifacts or whatnot and tying them all together into something bigger that's really I think the thing that keeps archeologists coming back, to keep putting more pieces together to try to understand the greater whole. 

Emily Charash (05:16) 
Can you describe a little bit about the Alaskan archaeological community? What's going on? What's the scene like here? 

Justin Cramb (05:24) 
Yeah. So we have a lot of different researchers doing a lot of different work here in Alaska. Alaska is absolutely huge. We were here in the interior, but there are other regions where there are other archeological specialists working. And so for the academic scene, we all work very closely together, be it University of Alaska Fairbanks or the other University of Alaska locations, as well as the UA Museum of the north. So we have a lot of collaboration that goes on within the archeological community here and a lot of people that are working on very different things. But we still communicate with each other about what we're doing. So we have people working on some of the oldest sites in the Americas. We also have people working on recent sites like the Chena townsite that we're working on. In the case of the Chena townsite, we regularly have archeologists from University of Alaska Fairbanks, from the Museum of the north, from the Bureau of Land Management, and we consult with others as well. So we have kind of all of these people interacting together to make sure we're all doing good work and able to get insights from each other on what we're finding. In the case of historic sites like this, if we have glass bottle, we can look at the manufacturer's marks on the bottom of the bottle. We can look at the way the bottle was constructed and was it hand blown? Was it done on a machine? Was it done on a machine that was assisted by people? And by getting all of that information, by looking at that artifact, we can identify where it was manufactured often. We can identify when it was manufactured, often down to a tight range of years. And then we can kind of understand where the materials that were winding up at Chena came from. And we have things from all over the lower 48 that have found their way here. We can also look at things like how people may have reused items over time. If you're out on the Alaskan frontier during the Gold Rush era, which is when the Chena townsite was in use, you're not going to be just throwing things away the way we do today. You don't have a big pile of recycling to take down or anything like that. You're going to reuse those objects because they're going to be somewhat more scarce than they are here today. We can try to understand the use life of these objects and how they fit into people's lives as we attempt to understand the community that lived out here. 

Emily Charash (07:58) 
What are some of the things that you think were going on there based on the things that we found so far? 

Justin Cramb (08:04) 
So Chena is a really interesting location. I've mentioned it's a Gold Rush era site, so it's mostly European population as far as we can tell so far, that have come in to the Americas and then made their way up to Alaska in search of gold. What's interesting about Chena is it's kind of a central distribution point. So we're not mining right on site per se. The people are getting their supplies and then going out to mine kind of further inland and the prospect on the Rivers and to look for gold in these locations. And then they would come back to an area like Chena to sell their gold, to stake their claims to do all of that. So Chena is acting as kind of the central point. And as such, it has things that you're not going to get out in the wilderness here. So we have blacksmith shops, we have butchers. We have lodging for people who are traveling through. We have places to overwinter animals in the harsh Alaskan winters, all of these things that are kind of needed to support this mining community. So when we're looking at these building foundations, yes, we're looking at mining, but we're also looking at kind of the domestic structure that follows mining, the support crew that has come up here also to make money in their own ways. Right. But not necessarily those who are out there actually doing the extraction of minerals, but people who are living in town supporting those practices and doing all the things that are necessary for that kind of expansion to occur. So Chena is a very short lived community. Chena was founded in just before or around the same time as Fairbanks. Chino was the first kind of town like proper town to support gold binding in the interior here or this far into the interior. Chena is right on the river, so it was a place of large boats could come and bring supplies. Fairbanks, on the other hand, its location was chosen kind of by accident. The founder of Fairbanks, ET Barnett, was kind of pushed off of the boat he was on when it had hit ground, and he unloaded his supplies here, and this became Fairbanks. What we understand of the two, they were both attempting to serve similar functions as kind of a base or a central point for the miners to come to. Fairbanks was more successful in the long run. So if they had this rivalry, Fairbanks was the town that won out, whereas Chena did not. And so by the 1920s, we don't have much left of Chena, and they're starting to tear down the buildings and relocate them either up here to Fairbanks or to put them on the river where they could easily be transported down to Nana. Two to 1920s is our kind of time frame. 

Emily Charash (10:57) 
What are some of the emotional aspects behind the excitement of being in this type of hands on environment and discovering things for the first time for some of the students. 

Justin Cramb (11:07) 
Sometimes a student will uncover an artifact, and then they want to essentially be with that artifact through its entire journey to see what happens to it. So they'll want to be the one to wash it, they'll be the one to catalogue it. So you get this kind of sense of attachment. I think it's a real sense of accomplishment that students often feel like, all right, we've done something real here, and we can follow that and learn how these individual finds tie into something bigger. You'll get real high levels of excitement. You'll hear a yell from across the site as someone has pulled some sort of artifact out of a screen when they're shaking sediment through to look for those small things. And then you get other students that become very interested in things that aren't so romanticized. So you'll get students that are very excited about the layering of sediments and the transition zones that you find. And you'll have students that are very excited about things like animal bones that are found in the excavations and things of that nature. So there's often high levels of excitement on a site as we kind of explore what the site has to offer and excavate into layers representing different areas in the past. 

Emily Charash (12:31) 
So as Dr. Cramb mentioned, our class takes place on an abandoned town site called Chena. To give more context on Chena and what it was in the past. Here's the surveyor who basically ignited the modern interest in Chena. 

Martin Gutoski (12:45) 
Yes. I'm Martin Gutoski. I'm a professional land surveyor and also a member of the Fairbanks North Starborough Historic Preservation Commission and the Tan and a Yukon Historic Society. Being a survey, I would process subdivision applications. There was a subdivision called Chena Marina, which showed a couple of survey corners that said US survey four, three, six Chena townsite. And so I looked at the map, and there's this huge 400 acre parallelogram that comes out of the borough base maps. And that was the old Gina town site. And so basically, the town of Chena was founded in two, and there was a trade store across from where Chena is now that was called Hendrix and Belt's Store, and those folks moved across the river. It's a big island across from Chena. And then they founded Chena itself, because when you're on an island, if it's the erosion side, that's okay. But if it's on the deposition side, then the bank keeps getting further away and you can't birth large vessels there. So they saw that the Tana was eating into where Chena was, and it was a good harbor for steam ships coming up from the States, going all the way up the Yukon and the Tanana to unload their cargo. So Chena was the big place to unload all the freight, and then the Tanana Valley Railroad would take the freight to the gold fields, or it would take it into Fairbanks, because then they could unload it. So it was 19 four. It was really starting to boom in 19 five. The steam train came in the little engine that's at Pioneer Park, and then they laid track to Fairbanks, and they laid track to Gilmore. Things were really booming up until about 1910, and then the gold ran out that was available with gold pants and drift mines. And so the gold was pretty well easy to get at for the first five, six years. But then you needed heavier equipment to really get the gold. And because of that, it was more and more expensive. And these little mining operations just couldn't afford the equipment. So as a result, by 1910, things started going on the downturn, and then World War I came around, and you lost a lot of manpower, and it just wasn't economical with a big Corporation to do the mining. Chino had more people than Fairbanks at one time. 

Emily Charash (15:19) 
Yeah. So what was life like in Chena? 

Martin Gutoski (15:21) 
Well, if you look at some of the pictures, there were a lot of big commercial buildings on the waterfront, and then all the other ancillary buildings like the saloons and the warehouses came from that. And then, of course, people settled there to try to take advantage of the boom or be employed. 

Speaker 6 (15:39) 
What was the relationship between Chena and Fairbanks at the time? 

Martin Gutoski (15:42) 
Very hostile. They had three newspapers that were at one time in Chena at various times. And of course, you had about two newspapers in Fairbanks. And if you read some of the microfilm that's down in archives, they're always bashing each other because it was a rival town. Chena was trying to survive during the gold rush, and Fairbanks was trying to survive in the gold rush. And so they're competing interests. And of course, when you got a town that's rivaling another town, it's sort of like Anchorage and Fairbanks only further apart. And so they were not friendly to each other. And as a result, when Fairbanks survived because it was the judicial capital, Chena started failing. And that's what killed it. Typical ghost towns that result from a boom, they're gone. They fade away. And there were a lot of ghost towns that were railroad stops in the gold fields. But when I discovered that there was a town of Chena, I investigate more and realize that it was rivaling Fairbanks. It had a population of over 1500 people, and Fairbanks had about that same population. But they're gone. They're just a footnoting history. And so you understand the basis for these booms that they seem like they're going to go on forever, but they fade. 

Martin Gutoski (17:00) 
If the economic impetus is not there, they're going to be gone. And Fairbanks is a sister city. But it survived when Chena didn't. And you just have to understand the history of development. And it's sometimes tragic. There are ghost towns. I didn't even know there was a town there till my father was a highway engineer for Dot. And they were realigning Lou Decker road because that used to be the railroad great. And he said, well, when he went out there, he could see railroad tires sticking out of the bank of the Canada. And of course, that's all gone now. So it's just such a brief period of time that it just didn't stick in people's minds. It's a gone town now. 

Emily Charash (17:41) 
I'm going to take you to class with me. So to give you a rundown of how my days go, wake up at like 830, head to class at nine. So when I say head to class, I mean, I'm driving 15 minutes from campus to the town site where Chena once was 100 years ago. We park our cars, get out, and then walk like half a mile from this parking lot into the woods. And that's where Chena was. It's on the water. We kind of have a view while we're digging, and then we set up for the day and start digging. So we're on site now. We're in the woods. We're at the former Chena town site. And I'm going to introduce you to some of my classmates here's. Lee. 

Leigh Cabaniss (18:22) 
I'm Leigh Cabaniss. I'm originally from Bozeman, Montana, but now I live in Alexandria, Virginia. I always remember being on my property in Montana and digging up things and sort of wondering when they came from. Anything you can find out about it, I just find it fascinating. I chose to come to Alaska in particular because my archeology professor actually recommended this field school. I've always just found it fascinating. I always think studying the past is some of the most interesting things you can do. There's so much we don't know, which is surprising, and it's always interesting to learn more.

Emily Charash (18:52) 
Here's Sam. 

Samuel Steele (18:53) 
My name is Samuel Steele and I'm originally from Austin, Texas. I always thought it'd be interesting to be in Alaska or do something in Alaska, so I chose this one. It's very like outdoorsy. I like places like that. I thought that it would be cool to be in the woods or in the mountains doing something. It's been interesting being in the woods every day and it's nice to just work outside. 

Emily Charash (19:17) 
As I mentioned before, one of my favorite things about this class was seeing how passionate my classmates were about this area of study. Here's our first time digging on the site. Me and my friend Julia were assigned to dig in a certain area. What we're looking for is anything at all that could have been used by a person is of interest and could provide us with information about exactly what was happening in the spot over 100 years ago. This is the moment she had discovered something for the first time in class. 

Julia Sonderman (19:43) 
Oh, my gosh. I found something that's so exciting. It's nails, but that's really cool. I love the sound of it. 

Emily Charash (19:50) 
Yeah. How do you determine whether it's a nail or wood? 

Julia Sonderman (19:51) 
You can just feel it. Oh, my gosh, it's so cool. That is really fun. Oh, my gosh. I've never found something before. That's really exciting. Yeah. 

Emily Charash (20:02) 
If you're thinking about taking this class, please do something UAF does really well is give a full on Immersive experience into the field in which you want to be working in. We did everything in this class from digging to cataloging in the Museum to hearing legit. Experts in the field speak about how they do this every day. Most days on site, people from the Bureau of Land Management, people working at the Museum, they would just show up and see what we are up to. This was usually intertwined with them, sharing interesting stories from their own work and how we can best navigate the field of archaeology in Alaska. In this class, you can expect to meet people that make up the field of archeology. Also, we went on like five field trips and you know. 

Emily Charash  (20:43) 
I love a good field trip. 

Emily Charash (20:44) 
But I definitely recommend this course for people interested in specifically the archeology field. Or if you're interested in history and working outdoors. 

Emily Charash  (20:52) 
This could be the field for you. 

Emily Charash (20:53) 
Definitely take a jump, come to Alaska and see for yourself. Thanks for listening to this episode of my Summer in Alaska. This podcast is presented by the University of Alaska, Fairbanks a special thanks to producers Marmian Grimes and Samara Taber. Thank you to everyone at UAF for more information on the classes that I took you can check out uaf.edu.